When a potential customer shops for a bank, they may visit a website or stop by a branch looking for information about how its offerings can help them manage their money when it is at rest in a deposit account, moving through the payments system or hard at work in an investment vehicle. The one question they won’t ask is, “What core banking system do you use?” What they tend to care about are competitive products that are easy to access online, from their mobile device, or with help from the branch or contact centre.
Table stakes – an omnichannel experience
Delivering a seamless, consistent, fast customer experience is no longer just nice to have – it is an expectation. From the technology perspective, it means an organisation’s core system must be able to deliver the right data to the right channel for the right purpose. Try as one might, big, monolithic mainframes cannot handle tasks like optimising the customer’s mobile experience; for example, it is not nimble or flexible enough.
Core modernisation is all about simplification. Relieving the mainframe of those extra duties can help it focus on what it does best: processing transactions. The channel then decides what data it needs at any given time and how it is going to use it to best serve the customer. The channel is where differentiation happens; it’s where the customer lives and breathes and makes judgments about an organisation’s service.
The many faces of a customer
In a legacy system, a company may have four different Jennifers living alone in four different silos: Jennifer the checking customer, Jennifer with the home equity loan, Jennifer who opened an investment account and Jennifer who just rolled over a certificate of deposit.
Core modernisation brings all the Jennifers together, providing every channel with one consistent view that gives bankers a new perspective of their overall financial needs. In decades past, banks attempted to accomplish the switchover in one big conversion, and the stories of chaos and failure are legendary. But technology has evolved. Today, a bank can be modernised by progressively migrating its systems one by one, over time, giving tight control over budget and risk.
